PODCAST: Catalan language under threat? – school and streaming woes
Are social, political and technological challenges putting the long-term survival of Catalan at risk?
òscar escuder
'You can watch 35 movies in Catalan and 93 in Icelandic on Disney+ in Catalonia'
Catalan faces constant difficulties to survive on a social and administrative level, say activists
Use of the Catalan language in courts “going backwards”
The NGO ‘Plataforma per la Llengua’, which aims to promote the use of Catalan as a tool for social cohesion, warned on Tuesday that the language is “going backwards” in the field of Justice. Only 3% of trials in Catalonia are in Catalan and up to 75% of lawyers that use it have been asked to use Spanish instead on at least one occasion, regretted the president of the NGO, Òscar Escuder. A new report from the organisation, however, also includes some positive figures: Catalan is now spoken by more than 10 million people, and up to 13.4 million understand it. Outside Catalonia, it is in the Balearic Islands where Catalan is most widely spoken: up to 80.5% of citizens there know the language. In French-Catalonia, however, only 35.5% of inhabitants speak the language.